Laps, Cook & Phillip Pool
Each
turn you think, "it's just another lap,"
add one to the running total, or swimming
perhaps, wearing down to a tired slap
from the early laps when you were skimming
like a stone across the surface with each stroke.
This is when it's like a soup brimming
with broiled, meaty swimmers going for broke
leaving you interfering in their wake.
A self-stirring broth. But when you poke
beneath the surface it turns out it's a lake
with band-aid reeds unanchored from the floor
and hairs coiled lazily as eels and flakes
of skin suspended in the murk, the spoor
of these pudgy freestyle lobsters as they
tumble-turn, kick off the wall and bore
through the pewter water like a tray
of fleshy bottle-openers tipped into
a bathtub, arms flapping and cogged grey
necks tortoising angrily. It's too
efficient, too sufficient, these machines
of pumped sexuality pumping through
this pool, the harbour's play-pen; it seems
like nineteen forty-two, the port swarming
with a squad of midget submarines,
only now they're leaving the water, warming
themselves in a shower then, ray-banned,
armoured in their pressed suits and disarming
with their ultraviolet smiles, these tanned
subs break the surface on each street
corner, fleshly invaders, oh so discreet.